‘Freed’ does not mean free: slavery and its abolition in the Highlands of Madagascar

In the current official language of Madagascar, which is based on the Merina dialect, ‘freedom’ is generally translated with the word fahafahana. This term originates from the word afaka, whose primary meaning is ‘detached from’, but it can also be used to refer more broadly to ‘being able to do something’ (as in afaka mihira isika, we can sing/we are free to sing) or to something that is ‘freed’ from something else. In this latter sense, it was one of the words used before the colonial abolition of slavery of 1896 to denote the slave who was manumitted by his master (olona afaka), but not the ‘free man’ per se. Between the ‘freed’ and the ‘free’ there was a hiatus that could not be bridged easily, since the dishonoured and impure status of enslaved individuals could not be removed simply, and, when it was removed through specific rituals, it continued to resurface in social memories (Evers Reference Evers2002; Graeber Reference Graeber2007; Freeman Reference Freeman2013; Regnier and Somda Reference Regnier, Falola, Parrott and Porter Sanchez2019; Regnier Reference Regnier2020).

At the same time, the contents, meanings and contours of ‘freedom’ were socially and legally articulated in quite different terms from those that developed in the European liberal tradition. During the nineteenth century, in the Malagasy regions under the control of the Merina rule, people who were not enslaved were nevertheless exposed to the arbitrary power and will of the sovereign (Raison-Jourde Reference Raison-Jourde and Rakoto1997), who obliged the so-called free part of the population to perform forced labour (fanompoana) for the crown (Campbell Reference Campbell1988). Fanompoana included both compulsory military conscription and agricultural or administrative tasks and was the main royal instrument to capture labour during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Imerina, individuals who were not enslaved belonged to three, generally endogamous, categories: the andriana (‘nobles’, i.e. people belonging to families with kinship ties with current or past sovereigns), the hova (the commoners), and the mainty (literally ‘black people’, who were ‘servants’ of the king and often enjoyed important political and economic positions). All these categories were equally exposed to fanompoana due to the sovereign, albeit often with different tasks according to their status. Slaves (andevo) belonged to a fourth statutory group that was excluded from fanompoana; they were legally considered to be the exclusive property of their masters, they were not recognized as legal parents of their children, and they were socially perceived as impure and dirty (maloto) and systematically infantilized (Bloch Reference Bloch and Watson1979; Rakoto Reference Rakoto1997; Larson Reference Larson2000). Ankizy (children) or zazahova (children of the hova) were terms often used to address them. They were ‘lost people’ (Graeber Reference Graeber2007) or ‘people without history’ (since their links to their ancestors were cut by enslavement) who – unlike other statutory groups – had no right to build family tombs for themselves or be buried in the family tombs of their masters. Mainly for this reason, in the Highlands of Madagascar, family tombs became a symbol of ‘free status’, testifying to the link between ‘free’ people and their ancestry and enshrining their rights over the land of their ancestors (Larson Reference Larson2001). People could be enslaved for crimes and debts, but the main sources of slave labour were raids against neighbouring political entities and the commercial networks that connected Madagascar with the East African coast, from where a large number of African slaves had been imported at least since the sixteenth century (Armstrong Reference Armstrong1984).

These four categories (andriana, hova, mainty and andevo) did not overlap perfectly with class distinctions, political power, economic conditions or the relative ‘freedom’ of individuals (Bloch Reference Bloch1977): rich families of hova and mainty origin could hold more important political positions and enjoy more power than rural families of andriana origin.Footnote ⁵ Certain slaves, such as those who were permitted to work autonomously as porters by their masters in exchange for part of their annual earnings, could enjoy better economic conditions and comparatively more ‘freedom’ than hova farmers with little land.Footnote ⁶ Slaves were concentrated in the hands of the Merina economic elite, and few families of rural origin held more than two slaves, even when the number of slaves was at its peak during the nineteenth century. Thanks to the agreements to abolish the external slave trade signed by the British and the Merina king Radama I in 1817–20, and to the conquest of two-thirds of Madagascar by the Merina rulers in the following years, the enslaved part of the population increased considerably in the Highlands of Madagascar, the heart of the Merina kingdom, during the nineteenth century, reaching between two-fifths and one-third of the total population in rural regions and half of the population in the capital, Antananarivo.

As well as olona afaka, freed slaves were known as hovavao (new hova), signalling that manumission was often not enough to reinsert people fully into the ‘free’ part of the population. This also held true for the slaves of African origin who were freed in 1877 by Queen Ranavalona II (Domenichini and Ramiaramanana Reference Domenichini, Ramiaramanana and Rakoto1997) in yet another attempt to discourage the slave trade in Madagascar, which had continued despite the 1817–20 Merina–British agreements (Campbell Reference Campbell1981). These freed slaves were named with terms such as makoa or mazombika that distinguished them from the rest of the ‘free’ population (Brown Reference Brown2004; Razafiarivony Reference Razafiarivony2005).

The French abolished slavery in 1896, a few months after the conquest of Antananarivo, but colonial policies did not create real paths of emancipation for former slaves: laws against vagrancy undermined the opportunity of former slaves to migrate in search of new job opportunities, colonial investments in cash crops benefited those who could claim ownership of land, thus excluding many former slaves, who were also more exposed to colonial forced labour, and – last but not least – colonial authorities ignored the many forms of labour exploitation that continued to link masters with their former slaves. And yet, former slaves tried their best to emancipate themselves from their subordinate positions. Some left their former masters, found new and unoccupied land to claim as their own, or settled on the main transport routes to work as porters (Rantoandro Reference Rantoandro and Rakoto1997). Others remained with their former masters and were able to renegotiate their position as sharecropper labourers. In some cases, masters gave them parcels of land for their own needs, in exchange for part of the crops or for days of work in their fields (Bloch Reference Bloch and Watson1979). Still others moved into urban contexts in search of new job opportunities. In Antananarivo, they became part of the growing lumpenproletariat living in the poor neighbourhoods called bas quartiers, unless they were recruited into the colonial army, the police, the lowest ranks of the administration or commercial companies (Gardini Reference Gardini2021). In all cases, they started to build their own family tombs in the hope of making people forget their slave origins, reinforcing their newly acquired land rights, and finally acquiring the social markers of honourability.

However, despite their best efforts, the stigma of slavery was not forgotten (Evers Reference Evers2002; Regnier and Somda Reference Regnier, Falola, Parrott and Porter Sanchez2019). By abolishing past processes and rituals of manumission together with slavery, colonial powers froze statutory distinctions and the descendants of former slaves continued to be called andevo by hova and andriana descendants who considered them impure, dirty and inferior.Footnote ⁷ Marriage between ‘free’ and slave descendants continued to be socially forbidden and slave descendants understood quickly that their ‘liberation’ by the colonial power was not considered legitimate by a significant part of the Merina elite. They might have achieved formal emancipation, but what mattered most was their inability to provide ‘clean’ genealogies and family histories (Razafindralambo Reference Razafindralambo2005; Reference Razafindralambo, Rakoto and Urfer2014; Graeber Reference Graeber2007; Regnier Reference Regnier2015; Reference Regnier2020; Regnier and Somda Reference Regnier, Falola, Parrott and Porter Sanchez2019; Gardini Reference Gardini2015; Reference Gardini2020; Reference Gardini2021).

Gerald’sFootnote ⁸ family history is a good example of the reproduction of the stigma attached to slave ancestry. Unlike people of ‘free’ or noble origin living in the hauts quartiers of Antananarivo, Gerald, a man in his sixties living in the bas quartiers, was unable to provide ‘a long genealogy’. He grew up with his mother and his sisters in the house of his maternal grandparents, not knowing who his father was or where he came from. During the colonial period, his maternal grandmother worked as a housemaid for a French family, while his maternal grandfather came from an unspecified village on the route to Ambatolampy, where his family worked as sharecroppers and where he never returned because ‘people there were bad against him and his family’. Due to his job as a bricklayer, and with the help of his wife, Gerald’s grandfather bought a small house in the bas quartiers and a small piece of land on the outskirts of Antananarivo where he built a family tomb where he and his offspring could later be buried. Gerald has spent much of his life trying to expand and renew both of them, these two little buildings being the material symbols of the ‘honour’ of his family. And yet, Gerald’s family history exposed them to still being considered as andevo, and Gerald could not marry the girl of hova origin he loved in his youth as her family strongly opposed the marriage. He later met and married a woman who shared with him a supposed slave origin and who lived in the same neighbourhood.

As in other post-slavery contexts (McDougall 2005; Pelckmans Reference Pelckmans2011; Gaibazzi Reference Gaibazzi2012; Rodet Reference Rodet2015; Becker Reference Becker2021), in the Highlands of Madagascar a lack of ‘genealogical freedom’ (Riesman Reference Riesman1977) can significantly affect individual trajectories of social and economic emancipation. This became particularly evident in the urban context of Antananarivo, where slave descendants have historically constituted the poorest part of the city (Fournet-Guérin Reference Fournet-Guérin, Sechet, Garat and Zeneide2008). This economic marginalization combined in Antananarivo with a progressive racialization of past status distinctions. The most commonly used dichotomy in the city today is between fotsy (‘white people’, i.e. people of hova and andriana origin who claim a Southeast Asian origin) and mainty (‘black people’, a category that – from being a privileged one in the past – slowly became a synonym of andevo and African origin).Footnote ⁹ A darker skin and frizzy hair are often considered proof of slave ancestry, despite the fact that most enslaved individuals were not of African origin and despite the fact that African slaves were freed twenty years before the andevo. But many of these processes are not known – or are systematically forgotten – by part of the fotsy population. As a fotsy public servant of hova originFootnote ¹⁰ told me:

As Paul Ottino (Reference Ottino1998) and Sandra Evers (Reference Evers2002) have pointed out, in many rural Malagasy contexts the lack of a ‘clean’ ancestry exposes people to stigma and subordination, as it often translates to limited and more precarious land rights and, therefore, a reduced amount of the economic autonomy that characterizes the members of ‘free’ kin groups. Even where slave and free descendants enjoy similar rights to land ownership, the stigma attached to slave ancestry is enough to make marriages between the two groups very difficult (Graeber Reference Graeber2007; Regnier Reference Regnier2020). To quote a Malagasy proverb, the stigma attached to slave ancestry is even worse than ‘the plumage that the hen can get rid of only after her death’ (lamban’akohoka faty no isarahana, i.e. a feature that characterizes your very essence), since it is transferred to the following generations in a seemingly endless cycle.

Fahafahana … and its malcontents

Charles RavoajanaharyFootnote ¹¹ is one of the few Malagasy intellectuals to have tried to reconstruct the genealogies of Malagasy notions of freedom (fahafahana). As he pointed out (Ravoajanahary Reference Ravoajanahary1968), the history of the term fahafahana is far from being simple or linear, and the process through which it became a direct translation of the Western notion of ‘freedom’ has been long and contested. According to him, fahafahana was a neologism first introduced by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century in their translation of the Bible into Malagasy, a long and complex task that involved many discussions and the creative redefinition of local terms that could convey the appropriate meanings (cf. Meyer Reference Meyer1999). Ravoajanahary stressed that fahafahana was originally used to translate the Christian idea that faith would free Christians from following the imperfect laws of mankind, but also that it was not the only word used to translate ‘freedom’ and it was far from being uncontested. In the Malagasy translation of the Bible from the 1830s, for instance, the term hamotsotra also appeared to denote the act of freeing someone from slavery, and at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century many Christian intellectuals still preferred to use the English words ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ or the French word ‘liberté’, feeling that there was no Malagasy term able to overlap perfectly with the Western concept of freedom. A malagasization of the English term ‘liberty’ gave birth to the word miliba, meaning ‘acting following your desires’. Despite these multiple translations, however, the word fahafahana progressively replaced all the others in later editions of the Bible, and its meaning came to cover not only slave manumission but also the liberation of people or the absence of obstacles of any kind (Ravoajanahary Reference Ravoajanahary1968).

The use of fahafahana as a direct translation of ‘freedom’ became popular in the first decades of the twentieth century, as long as it overstepped the boundaries of Christian debates and assumed different meanings in the local political arena. On the one hand, it was used during the beginning of French colonial rule by liberal Malagasy intellectuals, known as libres penseurs, in their campaigns against religious obscurantism and in their explicit support of French colonization. On the other hand, since the 1920s, but increasingly after the 1930s, the word became synonymous with independence (fahaleovantena) and was the central notion around which several anti-colonial movements and intellectuals organized their political activities. Today, together with Tanindrazana (‘Ancestors’ Land’) and Fandrosoana (Progress), it is part of the Malagasy national motto (Tanindrazana, Fahafahana, Fandrosoana).

According to Ravoajanahary (Reference Ravoajanahary1968), the notion of fahafahana was rather obscure and abstract, a term that fell short of capturing Malagasy meanings of freedom and missed many of their historical and cultural nuances. He proposed instead a different – and almost forgotten today – Malagasy expression that, according to him, could have conveyed better what freedom meant practically in the rural contexts of the Merina Highlands: mahatsangy no ary. This formula was composed of tsangy (shelled rice) and ary (a lot) and was used during marriages to address the young couple as people who had become able to provide economically for themselves and to create a new domestic group. In a wider sense, the expression was used to indicate ‘those who are able to perpetuate the honour of the family’ or ‘those who can replace their father with dignity and enlarge the wealth of the family’. This concept had at least a couple of advantages: first, it was rooted in the Malagasy rural world and was not a neologism from abroad (or from above); and second, it pointed to a more ‘positive’ concept of freedom – not ‘freedom from’ but ‘freedom of’. It recognized the process of social promotion and progressive economic independence of young people vis-à-vis their respective families, without denying the network of social relations and belonging that was necessary to create this sort of emancipation. The difference between the slave and the free lay precisely here. Enslaved people could never achieve the status, rights and relative independence of a fully grown adult. They were condemned to be socially and economically considered as children (ankizy) forever, as they lacked control of the means of production as well as the material and symbolic resources that were necessary to build mahatsangy no ary.

It should be said, however, that, despite Ravoajanahary’s attempt to find a Malagasy translation of ‘freedom’ better related to Malagasy rural experiences, the expression mahatsangy no ary did not gain currency as a popular alternative to fahafahana. None of my Malagasy interlocutors in Ambositra or Antanananarivo knew this expression or related it to the concept of freedom. Despite – or probably because of – its abstract nature, the word fahafahana has somehow encompassed all the conceptual space and meanings of ‘freedom’ and, in many cases, it is framed as a desirable condition to achieve. Indeed, while in the years between World War Two and 1960 fahafahana was often a synonym of independence (fahaleovantena) from colonial power, after independence it became clear that these two notions could not be conflated. The First Republic (1960–72), led by Philibert Tsiranana, saw the consistent presence and insertion of the French in Malagasy affairs and policies, making it clear that formal independence did not mean complete freedom from former colonial powers.

Despite the popular protests that in 1972 brought to an end the Tsiranana regime (Althabe Reference Althabe1980; Randriamaro Reference Randriamaro and Rakoto1997; Reference Randriamaro, Nativel and Rajaonah2009; Gardini Reference Gardini2015) and the subsequent rise of the socialist government led by Ratsiraka (Gow Reference Gow1997; Randrianja Reference Randrianja2003), many of my interlocutors believed that ‘real freedom’ was something that needed more than formal declarations in order to be achieved. This point, for instance, was the central topic of a song that all my interlocutors knew by heart, written by the group Mahaleo in 1982 and titled ‘Rafahafahana’. In the song, freedom is depicted as someone who refuses the friendship of the poorest and as a racist who prefers to enter the houses of rich, white-skinned people rather than dwelling among the poor:

As the Mahaleo song notes, in its practical use fahafahana – as mahatsangy no ary – is often conceptualized by making reference to status and class. Only those who can prove a ‘clean, fotsy’ genealogy and can provide economically for themselves are considered – and consider themselves – ‘really free’. Freedom has much to do with how local hierarchies are constructed and imagined in a nexus of unequal power relations. For instance, many of the domestic workers I met in Antananarivo and Ambositra (Gardini Reference Gardini2019; Reference Gardini2020) stated that freedom depends ultimately on the number of dependants you have, since only by ‘pushing some other down’ is it possible to have free time, enjoy a good economic position, and build a privileged and superior status. Their points of view problematized the depoliticizing framework on which abstract notions of freedom rested and stressed how freedom is closely linked to power relations. Beside the issues of translation that were at the core of Ravoajanahary’s analysis, it is therefore crucial to understand how the practical meanings of fahafahana change according to individual positions along the axis of status, class, gender, age and political agendas. In other words, the meaning of freedom is always relational and closely linked to local values, social position and political aspirations.

Freedom, in practice

When I met him in 2018, Olivier was a retired man in his late sixties, living in the hauts quartiers of Antananarivo, the neighbourhoods at the top of the central hills that form the capital’s centre and that are generally inhabited by the descendants of the Merina elite of the past. Olivier was proud of his origins and never missed an opportunity to emphasize the importance of his family history. He belonged to a family of ancient andriana origin, whose genealogy he was able to trace back to King Ralambo (sixteenth century). His nineteenth-century ancestors were all important functionaries or generals of the Merina kingdoms, many of whom had early access to Protestant missionary schools as part of their fanompoana and who sent their own children to school. Thanks to their literacy, their descendants enjoyed important public or economic positions during the colonial period. Olivier’s father also spent some time in France as a student, and, after World War Two, he became a keen activist in anti-colonial movements. First, he served in the MDRM (Mouvement Démocratique de la Rénovation Malgache or Democratic Movement of Malagasy Renovation), an anti-colonial party that was banned by the colonial authorities in 1947; then he joined AFKM (Antoko’ny Kongresi’ny Fahaleovantenan’i Madagasikara or Party of the Independence Congress of Madagascar), which was the MDRM’s successor politically. Both parties were the expression of a Merina educated elite flirting with Marxism, and both were considered with hostility both by the French colonial power, which supported parties that could guarantee a less radical transition, and by slave descendants and people from other regions of Madagascar (often known by the slightly derogatory colonial term côtiers), who feared that obtaining independence under the banner of the former Merina elite would mean a return of the Merina kingdom.

The political alliance between mainty and côtiers constituted the main foundation of the political parties that came to rule the country after independence, during both the First Republic (1960–72) and the Ratsiraka regime. Being nine years old in 1960, Olivier grew up in a political context in which the role of the Merina nobility was constantly under threat from new and emerging administrative and political elites. Of course, as Didier Galibert (Reference Galibert2011) has pointed out, a process of mutual assimilation among the elites took place and members of the Merina elite continued to play important political and administrative roles. However, the spectre of a return of the Merina hegemony was often raised to gain the support of the non-Merina majority on the island (Cole Reference Cole2006). Olivier had to wait until 2002 to finally see a fotsy Merina becoming president of Madagascar, and yet he believed that the only way to make Madagascar a country free (afaka) from external influences and to solve its many economic and social problems was for royalty to return. Olivier cultivated a nostalgic view of the Merina kingdom and believed that ‘freedom’ had been definitively lost with colonial conquest, independence being just smoke and mirrors:

By using the notion of hasina, Olivier was referring to a central concept of the Malagasy theory of power and was connecting it to a particular notion of freedom. Before colonial conquest, hasina was the name given to the silver pieces given as tribute to the sovereign, and also to the sacred power that flowed from the realm of the ancestors to the living, and from the top of the social hierarchy towards the bottom (Raison Reference Raison, Guillaud, Seysset and Walte1998). The Merina sovereign was conceived as the person with the greatest concentration of hasina, the andriana as having more hasina than the hova, and the slaves as having less hasina than anyone else. Hasina was connected to notions of purity and honour, to fertility and the ability to create wealth, and to the supernatural forces that gave power to particular individuals. From Olivier’s point of view, only those who possess hasina thanks to their genealogy are entitled to rule, since they are the only ones who can create prosperity and have enough power to be ‘really’ free from external influences. In his ideas of freedom converged notions of genealogical purity, the rhetoric of anti-colonial struggle, the stigmatization of slave origin, and the political agenda of a Merina nobility that has seen the slow decline of its former political influence.

Unlike hova or andriana families, slave descendants are often unable to provide lengthy genealogies and even their most ancient family tombs were built only after colonial abolition. Genealogical purity is rarely included in the meanings they attach to fahafahana. Malala, for example, was a nineteen-year-old woman, born in a rural area forty kilometres east of Antananarivo, who moved into the capital when she was twelve to work as a domestic for a relatively rich family of hova origin. As she told me, her grandparents were sharecroppers who, fifty years before, had been obliged to move to a new village – the one where she was born – because their previous landowners accused them of stealing part of the crop. In the new village, they found work again as sharecroppers, and in due time they bought a small parcel of land to build their own family tomb. Malala did not know where her great-grandparents were buried, nor if there was a tomb predating the one her grandparents built. Since she knew the implications of that in terms of status distinctions, she was ashamed to go further into the topic during our conversations and preferred to focus on the forms of exploitation she experienced as a domestic worker. After the death of her grandparents, Malala’s father and uncle took their place as sharecroppers. Malala was sent by her parents to work in Antananarivo after the end of primary school, since they needed money to send her younger brothers to school. Like many other young domestic workers I met (Gardini Reference Gardini2019; Reference Gardini2020), she never received her salary (it was sent directly to her family), she was often the object of insults and physical violence, and her employers denied her any free time with the excuse that they were responsible for her and wanted to avoid her getting pregnant. These points recurred in her definition of ‘freedom’:

According to Hannah Arendt (Reference Arendt1961), freedom is deeply rooted in action, and particularly in that kind of (political) action that is able to start something new and do the unexpected. For Malala, freedom was strongly related to economic independence and working conditions that could protect her from the dishonouring status of ‘being the servant of someone else’: a difficult goal to achieve for someone, like her, who was trapped within the intersectionality of different forms of subordination. As she remarked:

Beyond class and status, Malala stressed the gendered dimension of freedom, a dimension whose importance emerges clearly if we compare her case with the life trajectory of Njaro, a twenty-two-year-old man I met in a mountain village fifty kilometres east of Ambositra who had spent three years with a group of cattle-raiding ‘bandits’ (dahalo). Because of its very difficult access, the valley where he was born had been a place of refuge for runaway slaves and people escaping the control, first, of the Merina kingdom and, later, of colonial power. During the colonial period, former slaves found new land to cultivate there and a place where they could hide their origins. Among them were Njaro’s great-grandparents. Like many other young boys living in rural regions, Njaro spent his childhood as a cattle guardian, working for a richer family from Ambositra who had moved to the valley in the 1990s. Like Malala, the small amount of money he earned was given directly to his parents. Tired of this situation, however, at the age of sixteen he helped a group of young men to steal his employers’ cattle. A few months later, he joined them, spending the next three years raiding cattle within a radius of fifty kilometres. Cattle raiding has a long history in Madagascar and, for poor young men of rural origin, it has represented a way not only to accumulate wealth but also to construct their own masculinity (see, for instance, Rasamoelina Reference Rasamoelina2007). The group comprised about fifteen young men, approximately between sixteen and twenty-five years old, from different parts of the Highlands. After their raids, they sold the cattle to intermediaries who took the animals to urban slaughterhouses or, occasionally, sold them to international buyers. As Njaro remembered: ‘These were the more adventurous years of my life. We were really free [afaka]. We shared the loot equally, and no one could tell us what to do. We never killed anyone. We simply stole the cattle to sell them. I have never been so free in my life. It was fun.’ Njaro left the group when one of the leaders proposed buying weapons and starting to attack private houses and taxi brousse (‘bush taxi’): ‘You know, that was something else … I disagreed. It was dangerous. You cannot be free if you are dead or your hands are stained with blood.’ Thus, Njaro returned to the valley and started to work as a middleman and porter in the illegal trade of rum that connects the valley with neighbouring regions. When I met him, he had collected enough money to marry and to start to enlarge his parents’ house. Meanwhile, his former bandit group dismantled, with some members joining a more structured group that works in the illegal smuggling of rosewood for international traders. ‘They are not free any more,’ commented Njaro, ‘just exploited by some Chinese trader who leaves them the leftovers.’

While, for Olivier (an old man of noble origin), a talk about ‘freedom’ became an opportunity to discuss issues related to genealogical purity and to the political trajectory of the country, for two young people of slave origin, such as Malala and Njaro, talking about ‘freedom’ was a way to stress the importance of creating a space of autonomy from parental obligations and labour exploitation – a space that could help them achieve the social markers of adulthood and find the economic means to build their own families. Of course, the gendered dimension of these aspirations mattered. While Malala saw in a ‘good marriage’ her only way of emancipation and was scared that the stigma attached to domestic work could jeopardize her chances, Njaro could profit from job opportunities – albeit illegal – from which Malagasy women were generally excluded and saw his past cattle-raiding activities as a useful step in becoming an ‘adult and independent’ man. And yet, despite their different social positions, life trajectories and ideas, Olivier, Malala and Njaro did not frame their concepts of freedom in abstract terms but used them to criticize the practical and social circumstances that limited their chances of achieving honourability, as socially and culturally defined in the Highlands of Madagascar. It could be argued that, with the abolition of a clearly defined and legally sanctioned ‘slave status’, the concept of freedom has been detached in some ways by its conceptual opposite. However, even if the institution of slavery has disappeared, the quest for freedom continues to be related to social inclusion and the everyday efforts to be recognized as people who can ‘replace their father with dignity and enlarge the wealth of the family’, as the notion of mahatsangy no ary proposed by Ravoajanahary implied.